# Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup

> Jeff Dean, employee number 30 at Google and one of the architects of its modern AI stack, is leaving after more than two decades to run Discovery Loop, a new public benefit corporation. He is joined by a heavyweight roster of co-founders including Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, with early money co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures and additional support from Alphabet itself. The pitch is to point AI at the slowest part of science, the experimental loop, and automate it. Discovery Loop wants to run thousands of experiments in parallel and eventually explore recursive self-improvement, where systems refine their own research process with less human iteration at each step. Losing a figure of Dean's stature is a real signal about where ambitious researchers think the frontier is heading, away from chatbots and toward AI that does science. Whether automating discovery genuinely accelerates breakthroughs or mostly accelerates hype, it is a bet worth watching closely.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: TechCrunch · Published Friday, August 7, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Jeff Dean, employee number 30 at Google and one of the architects of its modern AI stack, is leaving after more than two decades to run Discovery Loop, a new public benefit corporation. He is joined by a heavyweight roster of co-founders including Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, with early money co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures and additional support from Alphabet itself. The pitch is to point AI at the slowest part of science, the experimental loop, and automate it. Discovery Loop wants to run thousands of experiments in parallel and eventually explore recursive self-improvement, where systems refine their own research process with less human iteration at each step. Losing a figure of Dean's stature is a real signal about where ambitious researchers think the frontier is heading, away from chatbots and toward AI that does science. Whether automating discovery genuinely accelerates breakthroughs or mostly accelerates hype, it is a bet worth watching closely.

## Source

[Read the full story at TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/05/jeff-dean-and-other-top-ai-researchers-are-leaving-google-to-launch-their-own-startup)

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